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After the first time - searing, shocking, sharp, a dunk into an icy pond, from which it feels that you can never quite be warm again - grief settles in like a muscle memory. It always hurts, of course, a slightly varying amount each time, depending on closeness, but that shock of the new is no longer there.
He has done this before. He will do this again.
There comes to be a ritual, a routine, to loss and sometimes that feels like a betrayal. Death, by rights, should knock him on his ass and make him rage against the snuffing out of each separate life; not feel like something he has unwillingly trained for, with the coping mechanisms slipping a little more firmly into place every time.
He isn’t actually a soldier, just because he wears a gun, these days, as often as not.
So, a small part of him finds a strange relief in the idea that Carson’s death has hit him so very hard, it’s almost like grief is new again.
The same part of him which wants to stay here, in this place of shock and emptiness, because it feels like he owes it to his friend; because he feels like something vitally human inside him is in danger of being scarred over and shorn of nerve endings and he would rather lean into the pain, than lose that connection entirely.
But he tells himself sharply (in a voice sounding uncomfortably like his father’s) that he doesn’t have the luxury of a breakdown. That Atlantis needs him and that work, and more work, is the panacea to all ills.
It doesn’t occur to him that a breakdown does not consider itself a luxury item; nor that he might have one without even noticing.
~~~
“I dreamed about Carson. About saying goodbye.”
Rodney wasn’t actually sure he had been asleep at the time. ‘Asleep’ and ‘awake’ blurred and danced mischievously around each other just a little more than they should do, these days, which was probably something he ought to be more concerned about.
But it seemed unnecessary to mention it.
Sheppard didn’t wrap him in his capable arms and hold him, good and tight, until he remembered how to cry, and it would have been highly disconcerting if he’d done so. And unwelcome. Probably.
That was … huh. A surprisingly grey area.
What Sheppard did do, was to wrap his fingers around Rodney’s wrist for a moment, the warmth of each separate finger clear and distinct as they exerted just a little pressure; not painful, but comforting, his thumb moving in a brushing motion, slight and probably involuntary. Rodney’s pulse reached out shyly to beat against them, like a small, fluttering kiss, until he softly pulled away again.
Not like a kiss. Rodney mentally shook out his wayward thoughts and wondered just how exhausted he really was.
“I miss him too, Rodney.”
They didn’t say much else for a while.
~~~
Dr Hartmann was the next person to die after Carson. Not to the Wraith, or some careless boobytrap left by the Ancients, for once, but a simple, stupid, tragic Away Team accident: just another case of typical Pegasus Luck.
Crappy timing for her, Rodney thought, dispassionately, as he automatically engaged grief mode and found it running smooth and slick and entirely devoid of actual feeling. So it had happened after all, just as predicted. He’d used up his mourning reserves, at last; he was all due process and zero pain.
“You know what I hate most about death?” he told the lab mice (it wasn’t because they reminded him of Carson, that he talked to them more and more often these days,; only because it sometimes felt like they were the only intelligent life around here). “The admin.”
That would be the worst of it for him, he was sure, now that he was all burnt out, not a single drop of grief-juice left in the tank. Only the endless annoyance of paperwork, the reduction of a life to a series of official forms and a steady ticking off the list of people you needed to advise.
It was a little unfair on Dr Hartmann that Rodney wasn’t going to feel the usual small ache at the space where she used to be, the unexpected things which reminded him of her, that heart-dropping moment when he started to distractedly assign a job to her, before remembering that she was gone.
But Hartmann was dead, so it hardly mattered to her if he didn’t do the grief thing properly. And, as for Rodney, it just made life easier that he wouldn’t be emotionally affected by these things. It would be better for Atlantis too, if he wasn’t clogged and slowed by an inconvenient sadness.
It was a shame that guilt crept in through the edges to gum him up anyway. Not just the standard, instinctive guilt of someone on his team - his direct responsibility - dying; though that feeling was very much present and correct.
But there was also the wash of vague guilt, despite himself, that he wasn’t hurting properly on her behalf; and that the worst of his distant, muffled, pain-adjacent emotions were related, not to Hartmann personally, but to the way that her death stirred up memories of others who were gone, and twanged on the strings of ancient griefs, a cacophony of past losses which took over her rightful place in the spotlight.
Carson, obviously, was stirred loudest and most jarringly, in his freshness; but everyone else whom he’d lost, to some degree - from his scientists (too many scientists), to a childhood sweetheart, to that complicated pain of losing his parents - was jammed forcefully into his mind: with those who had meant most, and hurt hardest, throbbing through his soul like toothache. Rodney could still feel for them, it seemed, even when he was incapable of forming a new grief.
A ridiculous system, if he couldn’t even be heartless properly and efficiently. But he supposed that it would come; in time.
Maybe, at some point, he would be grateful.
~~~
“There isn’t a right way to do grief, Rodney.”
Which was a lie, of course. You got punished if you didn’t follow the rules - from small things, like curious looks and pointed remarks, to outright ostracism - which mean that there must be rules in the first place, a template to follow, a path to raise eyebrows if you deviated from.
Rodney didn’t always know the shape of every social template - and he didn’t always care to follow them, even when he did - but he always knew when they were there.
“I just feel like I failed her.”
He stared at his beer for a while, John’s shoulder against his. The ocean stretched out around them, calm and peaceful and utterly uncaring. Neither the smallest sorrows, nor the greates, mattered to it in the least.
Rodney wasn’t sure if he was saddened or comforted by the thought. Or just felt nothing at all, a blank, indifferent neutrality, like the ocean itself.
He wasn’t sure he was ready for that, just yet.
“Hey, did you hear what happened in the lab this morning? I swear, it’s like being in charge of a pack of excitable six year olds …”
The conversation steered away from the floundering depths and back into a more comfortable path. Sheppard laughed, spurting beer very satisfyingly at the punchline.
The ocean rolled and rippled and shrugged, all the way to the horizon.
~~~
It had turned out that Rodney had been wrong about his ‘grief capacity reached’ hypothesis. The prospect of losing Elizabeth had burst something inside him, something flattened and repressed, like an exploding tumour of his own; and the aftermath of actually doing so, after everything he’d done …
…well, even work (and work and work) wasn’t patching up the hole. And now he was full of a fierce and burning awareness of the mortality of others, as if a timer was ticking over their heads; counting down the days until they, too, would be snatched away from him.
Some days - to his distant, muffled horror - he almost wished that it would happen: all of his loved ones gone at once, in one neat and clean swoop, so that he didn’t have to be made of permanent, agonising worry any more, in great, raw open trenches of mental fretting and pacing, ripping and tearing across his thoughts. So that he didn’t have to preemptively grieve his friends, even while he talked and walked and - less often, nowadays - laughed with them.
Maybe he really would burn out all his capability for grief then, along with every single part of him that wasn’t the single-minded pursuit of science.
It would be easier to lose all of himself, of course, to sink into a quiet, sweet oblivion, untouched by pain and guilt and fear and regret. But he never took those thoughts seriously, even when they whispered seductively in his ear.
It had been levied against him more often with accusation, than admiration, but Rodney McKay was a very, very stubborn man.
And, if he had never made life easy for himself, why should death be any different?
~~~
Sheppard opened his mouth to say something - comforting, accusing, broken; Rodney couldn’t tell - but what came out instead was a sob, ragged and small; which shocked both of them.
Rodney didn’t remember reaching out; wasn’t sure how John came to be in his arms. Wasn’t sure if the soothing noises came from him, or were for him, or whether there was soothing on both sides, soft and choked and awkward and deeply, deeply meant.
It had been so easy to forget, in all the self-recrimination and pain, that he wasn’t the only one hurting like this. That Elizabeth had belonged to all of them. Grief could seal you up in walls and block out everything and everyone else, except as ways to cause you further pain.
They curled up, unashamed and without barriers, and shattered together.
It was easier, that way, it turned out, to find each other’s pieces and rebuild. And, if a few bits got misplaced in the progress - a little of John in Rodney, and Rodney in John - then neither of them minded in the slightest.
~~~
“Losing someone really sucks. But whatever we lose in grief, it’s not as much as we gained from having them in the first place. Simple math.”
“Are you trying to frame this as an equation because I can’t deal with emotions or because you can’t?”
John shrugged at him, from his sprawled position on the bed and gave a half-smile, his face close enough to kiss.
“Little of both.”
Rodney followed up on his kiss train of thought, finding it a good and fruitful path to go down.
“Much as I think I might break in half from losing you, I suppose … it would be doing you a disservice to suggest that your death would be so hard to bear, that it cancelled out your life. Everything you gave me, everything you are. I wouldn’t swap that. However badly it hurt.”
John cupped his head and brushed his thumb gently over his ear. He always touched Rodney like it was a new experience, each time, something to rejoice in and savour, and Rodney shook with the tenderness of it, still struggling to get used to it, even as his own fingers found tenderness came very easily indeed.
“For a guy who’s not so good at emotions, you have your moments.”
“Yes, well, that’s all of my squishy softness allowance for the day, so don’t get used to it.”
”I think I’d be more unnerved if you made a habit of it, actually.”
John grinned at him, with that open, teasing love that Rodney was still getting used to and they kissed again, pressing close and intense; not with some mere squishy softness (of the sort which Rodney refused to succumb to, except in small, bearable increments), but as a way of reinforcing that equation, the balance of life against death, the good moments against the bad.
As a reminder that loss only hurts because there was something so very important to lose; and so very, very much worth having.